The article mentions that there are major merchant vessels sinking every two/three days! That seems huge. How many deaths per year does that amount to? We're lucky to be in tech I guess.
Fermi estimate, about 120-180 sinkings a year * 30 crewmembers/ship * 0.75 chance of dying (I'm guessing some sink in port or are evacuated?) = 2700 deaths / year.
Whether by luck or not, that's actually not far off one of the better estimates I can find. The paper "Fatalities among the world's merchant seafarers (1990–1994)" [1] ends up with a rough estimate of 2200 fatalities per year worldwide for the early 1990s. This is based on relatively good data from 19 major maritime flags and major insurance underwriters, followed by more shaky extrapolation to the worldwide numbers. Of the 2200/yr, the authors attribute about half to maritime accidents, so the number due to actual sinkings and such is lower, around 1100/yr in their estimate. The other fatalities break down as: 1/4 of the total attributed to occupational accidents (falling off a ladder, etc.), and 1/4 to illness while at sea.
The paper does mention that other estimates have reached both considerably higher and considerably lower totals (they quote one author who estimated 13,000/yr in the 1980s!). It's hard to get good numbers because the worst safety records appear to be among flag-of-convenience nations who also have the worst reporting and insurance practices, so a large portion of total fatalities (probably) come from the places with the highest uncertainties. But even among rich nations they did still find it a comparatively dangerous occupation: it's safer to be a Danish-flagged seafarer than most other flags, but still >10x the fatality rate compared to having a job on land in Denmark.
Good point. I was guessing randomly with justification. If I had guessed that 0.001% or 1000% of all sunk sailors died it wouldn't be a Fermi estimate.
A recent (paywalled) article in the New Scientist stated that the fatal accident rate for ships' crews is twenty times that of the average British worker.
How does the fatal accident rate for, e.g., professional drivers compare with the average worker? I imagine crewing a ship is more dangerous, but humans are famously bad at evaluating risk.
So being crew on a merchant ship is more dangerous that cops (by far), and probably more dangerous on say a 10 year timeframe than being in the military (since you probably aren't at war that much over 10 years, unless you are unlucky).
For the British merchant fleet, 19.5 deaths per 100,000 seafarer-years [1].
For American loggers, 90 deaths per 100,000 worker-years [2] making it the most dangerous job.
For American taxi drivers, ~18 deaths (of which 8 are murders) per 100,000 full-time-worker-years [2]. Making taxi driver the most murdered profession - and it was worse around 2000, when the rate was an eye-watering 23.7 murders.
As you say, policing isn't the most dangerous profession; the rate there is 11 deaths of which 3.5 are murders.
